NEIT to offer two-year bachelor’s in four majors

The New England Institute of Technology will offer bachelor’s degrees that students can attain in only two years starting this fall.

The four majors in which 24-month bachelor’s degrees will be offered are in cybersecurity, business management, graphic design and criminal justice.

While many schools now offer three-year bachelor’s programs, NE Tech’s quarterly schedule allowed the institute to cut off another year and get students into the workforce even faster, Provost Doug Sherman said.

“The reason that we can do this in two years is because our academic calendar is different from the traditional two-semester calendar,” Sherman said. “Our calendar is four 10-week quarters, so our students are actually in school 40 weeks of the calendar year versus the traditional 30 weeks – so it allows us to accelerate even more.”

To make sure students receive the same amount of education as a traditional four-year bachelor’s student would, Sherman said that NE Tech made changes to the overall curriculum, including the removal of general-education courses and reduction in the number of credits required to graduate.

“We worked very hard and very deliberately to integrate the general-education learning outcomes into our major courses,” Sherman said. “We’ve worked very closely with our faculty within our majors to develop new learning outcomes for certain courses that would help students to develop those same kinds of outcomes that we achieve in our more traditional bachelor’s degree program.”

The four majors chosen came out of a desire to allow students to enter the workforce in high-demand fields quickly, Sherman said.

Only four majors could be approved at the program’s onset, as the New England Commission of Higher Education was unwilling to give accreditation to more programs with no proven record of success. As such, he said, NE Tech chose the four programs based on which majors were most in demand.

“Our Career Services Department helps our graduates connect with employers, and so they’re very in tune with what the employment needs are in the local area and regional area and, for that matter, even nationally,” Sherman said. “So when we talked with them about it, we asked what they would select as the top four programs based on employment demand, and these four rose to the top.”

The format, Sherman said, would help students save money while allowing them to make money sooner as part of a growing workforce. He hopes it will help NE Tech increase its enrollment numbers as well.

“In many institutions across the country, there’s been a dip in enrollments, and it’s primarily caused by the fact that the demographics of college-age students is shifting – there’s less and less of them,” Sherman said. “Students are going to get a very high-quality education that produces meaningful skill sets that will help them get employed, and there’s an opportunity to start earning income one or two years prior to their peers who go through a more traditional pathway. So there’s that opportunity … that I think will attract a lot of students to come to these programs. It benefits everybody, really.”

Sherman said that the students in the program will be monitored to determine whether they’re achieving the same learning outcomes as students receiving a traditional bachelor’s degree.

If the program is successful, Sherman said, NE Tech would ask the New England Commission of Higher Education to approve more two-year bachelor’s programs.

“We’re going to collect lots of evidence,” Sherman said. “We have lots of ways to determine whether or not they’re receiving these same outcomes. And if we see this as something we’re successful in doing, we’re hoping that we can do this across the board with some of our other programs. We honestly think that if we are successful, especially with the integration of the general-education outcomes into the major classes, we think it could revolutionize baccalaureate-level education. Time will tell.”